Dr. Joseph Mercola, supporter and promoter of holistic medicines with science backing them up, has this article out on the latest in cannabis science in 2019 where he writes, among other critically insightful things:
Dr. Allan Frankel, a board-certified internist at GreenBridge Medical in Santa Monica, California, has treated patients with medical cannabis for the past 13 years.
Cannabis for Myasthenia Gravis
“I can see why Pharma is terrified,” Frankel says, “because the number of illnesses we’re now impacting is substantial.” For example, Frankel is now treating some 80 patients with myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disorder with a lot of weakness. Frankel has found a combination of THCA and CBD can reverse a majority of the symptoms.
“If they get access to CBD and sometimes THC and THCA, most of them get off their prednisone,” he says. “[Prednisone] is a horrible drug to be on long-term. Virtually all the patients get off their steroids and mostly get off their Mestinon and intravenous immunoglobulins (IVIgs).
I got one note from the ex-president of the Myasthenia Gravis Foundation that said, ‘He doesn’t know about all the immune drugs that are available for myasthenia.’
I wrote back: ‘Assuming ‘he’ is me, I actually think I am aware of them. I didn’t wear a sandwich sign and go out to Wilshire Boulevard recruiting these people. They are on pharmaceuticals. They’re doing terribly. They’re feeling poorly and they’re very weak. They can’t see. They came here. They’re doing better now. I’m OK with that’ …
This is something I talk to all my patients about. This is a vegetable plant. This oil is vegetable oil. This is nutrition. It’s absolutely nothing more than nutrition. It’s a perfect example on how nutrition is medicine and medicine is nutrition … People have been eating it, smoking it and cooking it for tens of thousands of years.”
Using Whole-Plant CBD as a Nutritional Supplement
If you’re generally healthy, Frankel regularly recommends taking 10 to 15 milligrams of CBD a day, taken once a day at nighttime, as a nutritional supplement to support optimal health.
“I take 40 to 50 milligrams of whole-plant CBD,” Frankel says, “But it’s not just for prevention. My parents were Holocaust survivors. My sister and I ended up with this horrible anxiety and early morning awakening syndrome, where for decades I would wake up at 1 o’clock in the morning sweating. CBD stopped it in two days. That’s one of the things that convinced me that this is too exciting not to do.”
Frankel also points out there are animal studies showing that if you give CBD up to a week before or a week after a coronary or a stroke, you improve the outcome by about 40%. And, while CBD has neuroprotective effects, THCV is showing promise in the actual reversal of neurodegeneration.
Whole-plant CBD can also work wonders for acute gout pain, and when taken regularly, can help prevent recurrence. “I have three or four patients who are taking CBD and stopped having episodes of gout,” he says. It’s worth mentioning though that gout is frequently triggered or worsened by oxalate-rich foods, so it would make sense to address your diet and not just rely on a CBD supplement.
That said, Frankel claims CBD supplementation actually helps lower uric acid levels, which is rather interesting. CBD may also help lower blood pressure (thus caution is needed if you’re on blood pressure medication), and stabilize low-density lipoprotein (LDLs) levels and lower total cholesterol.
Frankel also discusses the use of CBD to help wean patients of opioids and benzodiazepines. For those details, please listen to the interview or read through the transcript.
The Future of Cannabis in Medicine
Frankel predicts Kaiser Permanente will play an instrumental role in bringing medicinal cannabis to the mainstream.
“They flew me to Maui [where] I gave a talk to the Kaiser surgeons on using cannabis as a replacement for narcotics. It makes all the sense in the world that Kaiser is going to be one of the big players in that area because they have all the incentives wrapped into one to make it work.
Kaiser doctors are now sending me patients. That would have never happened five years ago. I mean they couldn’t even mention the word … One other thing I want to share is that for cancer and seizure patients — and eventually all patients — is that the tinctures, the oils, are going to become way more complex.
If we had plants from 200 to 300 years ago, they were way more medicinal because they didn’t have THC at 20% to 25%. THC was 1.5%. CBD has been around for a long time. THCV has been a big deal. All these plants had a percent or two of each of these major cannabinoids.
I would imagine that picking it raw or smoking or cooking some of these plants that were a couple of hundred years old would be really, really medicinal …
All I’m doing is saying, ‘The plant was way better 100 years ago, before we started messing with it. Let’s see if we can reproduce that plant in a bottle today.’ That’s kind of what my overall goal is.”
When it comes to cancer treatment, Frankel admits we still don’t know enough to make any hard and fast prescriptions. “We know that a 1-to-1 of CBD and THC is effective for a lot of solid tumors,” he says. “There are clinical trials out now with glioblastoma and astrocytomas.”
In Europe, doctors are also experimenting with low-dose chemotherapy combined with various cannabinoids, showing improved outcomes. Frankel, in his cancer treatments, started using mixtures of CBD, THC, THCA and CBDA nearly three years ago. Now, he’s starting to add in THCV and THCVA.
“I see the cancer thing blowing up in a big way. In Israel, at the Tikun Olam, they just put in half a billion dollars to study cannabis and cancer. And then there are clinical trials coming out, virtually all of them are showing very positive results. Cannabis doesn’t necessarily need to replace everything. It’s one more tool for the doctors’ and the patient’s toolbox to use.”
Dr. Mercola’s article also discusses why dabbing is a bad idea (calling it a “zero-sum game”), why Autoflowers are good for patients who grow marijuana at home, and THCV’s importance for depression/anxiety patients who want euphoria and stimulation without psychoactive intoxication. Check out Dr. Mercola’s article in full here.
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